Last week, we reviewed the Aspire One, Acer's entry into the netbook market. The small but powerful device comes preloaded with either Linux or Windows XP, and we reviewed the Linux version. Even though most people will never need to go beyond the default Linpus Linux offering on the One, more advanced users will quickly hit the wall Acer set up: it has more or less completely locked down the Xfce 4.2.2 installation on the One. This bothered me - this is a powerful machine, so I want a powerful operating system. I went for Ubuntu 8.04.1 - read on for a few thoughts on how well GNOME's user interface fares on a small-screen device such as the One.

It's not the fonts...I can deal with that. It's the layout of everything else. It's just so big and you can't do anything about. I didn't get a high resolution screen so that I can look at the moral equivalent of 800x600. Other environments let you adjust font sizes and the like so that, if you so choose, you can make it look like 800x600, but Gnome basically decides for you that clearly you want to have terrible use of screen real estate and the only option is to hack the themes yourself. And that still doesn't fix the problem of apps that waste empty space.

There's no way to fix the themes without editing a config file in /usr/share/themes. There's almost no documentation for theme configuration, or it is well hidden. You have to use trial and error. Compare that to KDE or Windows where you can easily control theme settings. Especially on Windows you can control the sizing of various components.

It's not the fonts...I can deal with that. It's the layout of everything else. It's just so big and you can't do anything about. I didn't get a high resolution screen so that I can look at the moral equivalent of 800x600. Other environments let you adjust font sizes and the like so that, if you so choose, you can make it look like 800x600, but Gnome basically decides for you that clearly you want to have terrible use of screen real estate and the only option is to hack the themes yourself. And that still doesn't fix the problem of apps that waste empty space.

I have no idea what you mean when you say "apps that waste empty space". That doesn't mean anything. Maybe you mean the iconbar in GNOME applications? No that can't be it, you can turn that off in the Appearance preferences.